“Oh, do!” gasped Winnie, her prudery delightedly offering itself to be shocked.
Zoe’s voice was heard in the distance shrilling a duet of deathless memories with Silvester in the pantry.
“You couldn’t do it if she were in the room—she wouldn’t give you the chance,” Gillian said, letting her lingerie fall from her lap in despair. “But as it is, Deb, I officially invite you to tell Winnie the Unofficial Story of your Life—it may widen her outlook.... We’ll keep quite still, Antonia, Nell and I.”
Deb began, hands clasped behind her head, eyes contracted as in dreamy contemplation of small figures specking a curly, dusty road:
“For the moment I can only remember John Thorpe and his mother’s ear-trumpet. I was wildly infatuated with John Thorpe, so I used to ingratiate myself with his mother through her ear-trumpet. Not many people in the hotel would bother with that ear-trumpet, but I thought it was a short cut to Paradise.... Once I heard him bellowing to her in the strictest confidence that Ellaline had accepted him the night before. And I had to go on ingratiating myself down the ear-trumpet, because he and everybody would have noticed it if I’d suddenly left off. One has one’s pride.... At the end of eleven days my throat was as sore as my soul ... so I went to Germany on a visit and the war broke out....
“And that was for me the dawn of love....
“I can’t keep to any chronological order, of course.
“The next thing that stands out is three minutes—well, it can hardly have been that. I’d gone to bed with a headache—not a very bad one; and when I heard Phil’s voice in the hall—he’d motored over with a party—I wished I hadn’t pretended it was too bad to stay up. I heard him say: ‘Where’s my wife?’—he always called me his wife.... They answered laughing, ‘first floor, second door on the right’—the thud of his feet on the stairs. Then he was on the bed and had me and the quilt and the pillow all swept up and smothered up together in his arms.... I was simply dazed with his kisses—and with the hot tingling feel of his hands. He rushed downstairs again and I heard him explaining lightly to the others that he’d popped in his head at the door. He went abroad a little while after....
“And I sometimes think that was for me the dawn of love.”
“You let him come into your bedroom?” panted Winnie. “You let a strange fellow sit—on—your—bed?”